by David Lamble

Israeli director Eytan Fox's Yossi
is the powerfully moving yet understated sequel to
his 2003 tragic gay romance set on a battlefield Yossi & Jagger.
In Yossi (opening
at Landmark Cinemas),Foxraises the stakes for his depressed
survivor, while expanding on his story's parallels to the restless cowboys of Brokeback
Mountain.

Based on events from the War in Lebanon, Yossi &
Jagger thrust us into the beehive of a
co-ed Israeli Army platoon patrolling a dangerous slice of the Golan Heights,
bordering Syria. Anticipating Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain,
the American-born Fox brought a two-year clandestine
gay affair between the closeted Yossi and the more accepting, rock-star
handsome Jagger to an equally grim climax. Yossi & Jagger
ended with the clinically depressed Yossi preparing
to hunker down at medical school, and in a stint as a Tel Aviv heart surgeon.

The sequelopens as
our now-pudgy doctor Yossi (Ohad Knoller) is awoken from a nap by a shy hospital
receptionist with more than a slight crush on him. The woman's passive-aggressive
invite for a "romantic" theatre date is rudely interrupted by Yossi's
womanizing buddy, Moti. Moti is a believable chauvinist essayed with diabolic
glee by Lior Ashkenazi. He's the devil seducing Yossi into a pub-crawling "boys
night out" that deepens his funk over the loss of Jagger, and threatens
the last remnants of his self-respect. Fleeing Moti's debauchery, Yossi sends a
dated sexy photo of himself to a cynical bar owner, who rips him for "cyberdate
fraud."

It's at this low ebb that our miserable guy hatches a plot
to steal back his soul. In a scene that's a parallel universe to Brokeback
's third-act confrontation between Ennis and his dead
lover Jack's American Gothic parents, Yossi sits in the same tidy living room
where a decade earlier he sat Shiva with Jagger's parents, and proceeds to
replace the myth of Jagger's "Army girlfriend" with the implacable reality
of himself, the doctor.

"I was with him when he died. I held his hand. I begged
him not to close his eyes. I leaned over and kissed him; his lips were still
warm. I didn't care that there were people around, I said, 'I love you.' Not a
day goes by that I don't wonder whether he heard me, if he knew."

It's at the moment where Yossi is sitting in his dead lover's
bedroom that the emotional arcs of Yossi and
Brokeback Mountain diverge. While
Ennis will forever sit in our hearts doubly cursed, Annie Prouix's eternally
grieving lover and Larry McMurtry's marginal "cowboy in suburbia,"
Fox gives his paunchy doughboy an unexpected third-act reprieve. Driving south
towards Sinai, Yossi spies five hot Israeli soldiers wolfing down a junk-food
lunch. The guys are so into their physical pranks that they miss their bus.
Yossi offers to pack the boys into his hatchback like succulent sardines. When
he leaves his dead lover's room, Yossi is existentially free. The five soldiers
neither know nor care about his limbo, about the links between his old platoon
and these sassy, rude boys.

Fox uses a cultural joke to make the point. Driving through
the desert, the soldiers ask him to put on some music. Yossi obliges with
Mahler, the movement many of us associate with the soundtrack from Death in
Venice. Bad choice! Told who this gloomy
Gus is, one of the soldiers asks, "Miller?" These guys are
Philistines, and proudly so. It's as if Yossi ran into our beloved SF Giants
heroes, as if Tim, Matt, Buster, Pablo and Madison were in that tiny car, just
looking to chill.

One of the hitchhikers is a pushy, totally out gay boy, Tom
(Oz Zehavi). Sensing Yossi is depressed but clueless as to why, Tom suggests
that he take a relaxing massage. Tom might just as well be speaking Swahili,
and the balance of the movie is spent with these obstinate dudes fighting along
the pleasure/pain divide.

The New York Times
damns Yossi "as a soft
feel-good fantasy of romantic salvation." Wrong! Yossi &
Jagger (2003) was a low-budget miracle, a
65-minute tragedy as lean and dramatically satisfying as a Golden Age TV drama.
Yossi follows a decade of awe-inspiring gay
rights advances. Would a depressed, damaged and deeply closeted soul like Yossi
thrive in this new era? Yossi is
Fox's optimistic, emotionally satisfying answer, offering his gay Job a well-deserved
second chance at not only love, but life itself.

My chat with Eytan Fox followed his mad sprint across Paris,
where he's completing Cup Cakes, a
large-scale musical.

David Lamble: I loved how Yossi
is so entertaining as a stand-alone story, and how
with Yossi & Jagger it
becomes an intensely personal epic. Why extend the story a decade later?

Yossi director
Eytan Fox. Photo: Strand Releasing

Eytan Fox: I had guilty feelings about leaving Yossi in that
unresolved place 10 years ago. It was a therapeutic thing, I could go back 15
years into my past, to see where I was, which issues I resolved and which I'm
still working on.

I was reversing the classic cliche where it's the mother who's
more accepting. Today, often it's the fathers who find it easier.

You pull off the trick of having Yossi get a second
stab at happiness late in the movie.

I started therapy when I was in the Israeli Army. I was
dealing with the tough experience of being an openly gay guy in the Israeli
Army in the early 80s, with a war going on. The word "gay" didn't
exist. We're taking Yossi through therapy, he's post-traumatic and he doesn't
want to deal with that. Eventually he realizes he can't sweep it under the
carpet. Part of that is going to Jagger's parents, saying this is who I was,
this is who your son was. Then he can go on to the next phase, being pursued by
a much younger man. You go through very difficult places in order to reach much
better places.